


Fault

by hylian_reptile



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 19:20:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14267850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hylian_reptile/pseuds/hylian_reptile
Summary: Zelda says that between his memory of coming down from the Spring of Wisdom and their run through the forest, Link had turned his back on Castle Town and run from the Calamity to save her. Link knows she's wrong.





	Fault

Many weeks after Zelda destroys the Calamity, after the sun sets and Link lights the gas-lamps of their Hateno house, Zelda tries to jog Link’s memory. She is filling in the gaps between the snapshots he knows, moments he’d inferred but were truthfully unknown to him. Even the bits he knows feel like seeing through someone else’s eyes. He isn’t very interested in remembering anything, to be frank, but he suspects it brings her some peace of mind to reopen about old wounds. 

 

On this particular day, Zelda says that between his memory of coming down from the Spring of Wisdom and their run through the forest, Link had turned his back on Castle Town and run from the Calamity to save her.

 

Zelda confesses that she’d frozen when they’d discovered that the Calamity had turned the Guardians and Beasts against them, putting together the pieces of what the messenger had reported, when Link had grabbed her hand and a horse (which was later incinerated by a Guardian) and made a break for Hateno. Not a word before he’d turned tail. Not a moment to panic. Not even an offer to discuss their plan of action with Zelda. Not even a glance to spare for the messenger, or the other two-hundred civilians surviving in the wreckage of Castle Town. The way Zelda recounted it, he’d taken no orders from her and had waited for none—

 

—but here, the guilt in her soft voice is unmistakable, the easy, well-tread roads of self-flagellation taking new shapes: it was  _ her _ fault that Link had to abandon Castle Town, her fault they’d had to run and give up instead of fighting, her fault they’d left her father, a whole city, all the Champions to perish without their hero, all because Link had to babysit a useless, powerless Zelda, no matter what the cost. Everything of the Calamity had boiled down to her and her missing powers, if you took Zelda’s word for it.

 

_ It’s all my fault. I left them all to die, _ she’d said in the forest, of a decision Link had made himself. 

 

Link’s hands are washing dishes in the Hateno house sink. Round strokes. Steady. At the moment he knows that what Zelda says is untrue, the motion of his hands doesn’t falter at all.

 

The truth is, Zelda had known her knight first and Link second, and only one of those two had come out of the Shrine of Resurrection. Knights, after all, go down with the orders and laws that make them. By the time the Calamity struck, what orders were he going to follow? Which monarch would reward him for saving Zelda? Which law would punish him for dragging her with him into a fight? There are no laws in an apocalypse, no such thing as knighthood without its government.

 

Nowadays, without a single law in sight, running is not only a word in Link’s vocabulary, but a word he uses when he likes. He won’t go into a Lynel fight without the proper equipment. He will run if he’s out of bows, just because he likes having them on his back and he can always come back to finish the job. He won’t even move from camp without two dozen ready-prepped meals and a fairy tonic besides, because he likes to eat. He won't back down from a Lynel fight at any time, just because he enjoys them, equipped or unequipped. He’s never failed to lend a helping hand to fellow travellers on the road not because he has to, but because he wants to.

 

Link runs when he wants to. Link fights when he wants to. That’s how it is now in this living, breathing Hyrule without laws. Sometimes, it really can be as simple as doing precisely what you want. 

 

_ Do you remember? _ she asks.  _ The moment when we decided to run? _

 

He thinks on it. Shakes a plate dry and puts it on the rack. He’s not going to lie. 

 

He admits he doesn’t remember.

 

She sighs. Not surprised, but not happy.

 

Zelda would never believe him, but he knows enough about the Calamity and himself to know what he would have done. Hyrule’s walls pinned them both to histories and duties, like butterflies to a corkboard—a kingdom that was hers, belonged to her,  _ was _ her, a kingdom that had taken a life of its own to ensnare her in its traditions and expectations. But Zelda misses the trappings of her old pain, as if Hyrule is not, at its heart, only the two of them and nothing else. If Link ever missed such a kingdom, he doesn’t remember, and doesn’t want to. He’s not interested in loving anything that hurts him.

 

One day, when she might believe him, he’ll tell her: without Hyrule’s laws and rules, he runs when he wants to. He stays to fight when he wants to. If, long ago, he’d ever turned his back on Hyrule, left hundreds of people to die, and run away with her—

 

—well. 

 

In the future, he hopes that she’ll see that it could be that simple. 


End file.
